Don Bateman, an engineer who invented a cockpit device that warns airplane pilots with colorful screen displays and dire audible warnings such as “Caution Terrain!” and “Pull up!” when they threaten to crash into mountains, buildings or water — an innovation that probably saved thousands of lives — died May 21 at his home in Bellevue, Washington. He was 91.
His daughter Katherine McCaslin said the cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease.
The ground proximity warning system to which Mr. Bateman began working in the late 1960s, and continued to improve until he retired from Honeywell International in 2016, warns pilots about accidentally hitting land or water due to poor visibility and inclement weather, once the leading cause of airline death.
That category of plane crashes has almost been eliminated. According to data collected by Boeing on commercial jets worldwide, there were only six such accidents between 2011 and 2020, which killed 229 people on board, compared to 17 accidents between 2001 and 2010, which killed 1,007 people, and 27 accidents between 1991 and 2000. 2,237 fatalities.
“Don Bateman and his team have probably saved more lives through safety system technologies than anyone else in aviation history,” Charley Pereira, a former senior aerospace engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board, wrote in an email, estimating the number. the thousands.
“He was very passionate,” Mr Pereira added. “He was a typical engineer, with pocket protector and pencils and pens, but he taught me what it means to be a safety engineer.”
Mr. Bateman was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2011 for developing and championing “flight safety sensors, such as ground proximity warning and wind shear detection systems, now used by more than 55,000 aircraft worldwide.”
Bob Champion, a former scientist at Honeywell who worked with Mr. Bateman, said in a telephone interview: “Don had a real passion for saving lives. He was a peach, but behind closed doors, when we were talking things out, he could be a pit bull.
Mr. Bateman was a pilot himself, flying a single-engine Cessna 182.
“He never lost his childlike wonder at flying,” Ms McCaslin said by telephone. “He did a lot of his great work from the age of 40. He started flying and running in his forties and went on to do 50 marathons. And he had his last child when he was 54.”
Charles Donald Bateman was born on March 8, 1932 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His father, George, repaired watches and owned a jewelry store. His mother, Gladys (Noel) Bateman, was a housewife. They divorced after World War II.
Don’s interest in airline safety began when he was 9, when one of his friends looked out the window of their Saskatoon classroom and saw debris and what appeared to be people falling from the sky. Two military aircraft, with 10 men on board, had collided in mid-air. Don and his friend snuck out of school early and rushed to the scene of the accident.
“I had never seen blood from a human being before,” he told The Seattle Times in 2012. “It was horrible.”
After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering, Mr. Bateman as a television repair technician and owned a television repair shop. He was hired by Boeing in 1958 and moved to United Control, an avionics company, two years later. The company’s aerospace instrument business is now part of Honeywell.
Mr. Bateman told the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation in 2011 that there were fatal accidents nearly every month in the late 1960s, where a pilot “flew into something, like a mountain, or came up short on the runway.”
At the time, pilots used the altimeter, which measures altitude, terrain maps, and visual cues to avoid accidents. “But in poor visibility and clouds, those signals were less effective,” said Dr. Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, in an interview.
Determined to do something, Mr. Bateman developed his first ground proximity warning system – and patented it in 1974 -: a small box that integrated data from the aircraft, including the radar altimeter and airspeed indicator, and gave the pilot a 15-second warning. of an impending dangerous situation.
The device saw limited use in 1971 when Alaska Airlines Flight 1866 — a Boeing 727 jet using an early version of the system — crashed into a fog-covered mountain in Alaska’s Chilkat Range on approach to landing in Juneau , the capital. All 111 people on board were killed.
Two weeks later, Mr. Bateman followed the same path of Flight 1866 as the passenger in a small plane equipped with his device. The alarm sounded with seconds left, giving the pilot enough time to fly to safety. But Mr. Bateman realized it wasn’t enough time for the Alaska Airlines pilot to react.
“I was disappointed,” he told Bloomberg.com in 2016. “We had to do better.”
He did. By 1974, the system had improved enough, with earlier warnings, for the Federal Aviation Administration to mandate its installation on all domestic aircraft. The agency acted after a TWA flight crashed into a wooded slope in Virginia that year, killing 92 people, an incident that led a congressional panel to criticize the agency for delaying action to improve airline safety .
In the 1990s, the system improved exponentially. Engineers working with Mr. Bateman added GPS and critical terrain data, including topographical maps of Eastern Europe and China mapped by the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s; they had been acquired in Russia at the request of Mr. Bateman.
“We knew as engineers that if we could get the terrain data, we could do an awful lot,” he told The Seattle Times.
Crucially, the renamed Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, or EGPWS, warned pilots for two minutes of obstacles ahead. In 2000, well after many major commercial airlines began using the system, the FAA required it be installed in all registered turbine aircraft with six or more passenger seats.
In addition to Mrs. McCaslin, Mr. Bateman is survived by his wife, Mary (Contreras) Bateman; another daughter, Wendy Bastian; two sons, Greg and Patrick; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His marriage to Joan Berney ended in divorce. A third son, Dan, died in 1988.
In 2015, Mr. Bateman wrote in the magazine Hindsight, an airline safety publication, about six recent, independently investigated incidents where the warning system averted disaster.
For example, in 2014, the crew of a Saab 2000 twin-engine turboprop lost control of the aircraft near Sumburgh, Scotland, after they failed to realize that the autopilot was still on after a lightning strike. But, Mr. Bateman wrote, the crew “recovered from a high rate of descent to the sea surface following EGPWS warnings.”
